Sympathy for the Devil
by Beguile
Summary: After another near-death experience, Matt seeks refuge in the church. Maggie is there.


Disclaimer: the characters and concepts in this story are the property of Marvel and their related affiliates. This is an amateur writing effort meant for entertainment purposes only.

Summary: After another near-death experience, Matt seeks refuge in the church.

Maggie is there.

Author's Notes: A quick h/c one-shot between Maggie and Matt set post-s3. Gosh, I love Maggie. I want to write her into everything.

* * *

Sympathy for the Devil

Matt tumbles down the last of the steps and cracks his shoulder on the edge of a shelving unit. His legs wobble underneath him, water dribbling out the fine pores of the suit onto the stone floor. The droplets echo through the space, rippling the cobwebs in the rafters, plinking along the walls of the ancient foundation.

He is alone. The church above him is quiet; the crypt around him is empty, dark. Candles smelling of cold wax. Matt heaves a sigh of relief over his ravaged sinuses, voice breaking from the sting. There's a gag still fitted tightly in his mouth, saturated with blood and saliva. Matt tries not to think about it as he staggers further into the crypt.

His legs give out. He lands shoulder-first on the ground. The gag can't muffle his grunt of pain, nor can he stop himself from flailing afterwards, struggling to stand or break the chains on his wrists or both. He can feel the padlock holding his bonds hanging in his gloved palm, but there's no way to read the combination without circulation in his fingertips.

The darkness in front of him seems to spin. Matt slithers through the torpor, half expecting to plunge headfirst into a pillar. He doesn't, but he doesn't manage to get back on his feet either. He bends his legs at the knee and tries to stack himself on top of them, but the floor is so inviting against his battered, bound face. He doesn't think so much about not being able to breathe with the stone at his chin. This isn't the first time he's found stability on the floor of Clinton Church, and it won't be the last.

Footsteps appear. The gate to the crypt swings open and shut. Matt rolls behind the pillar. He brushes his face up against the stone, trying to move the gag, but all he ends up with is concrete burn on his cheeks, cracked lips from the friction, and a mouth so full of blood he has to swallow more of it to breathe.

The footsteps come to the centre of the antechamber and then stop. A heart beats within a small frame, the sound slightly tinny. Matt sniffs and a spark of Jameson's hits his nose. A hot toddy.

Matt tilts out from around the pillar. The heartbeat spikes, but Maggie's voice is calm as ever, "Speak of the Devil."

He settles back to the other side of the pillar, eyes rolling inside his mask. Like he hasn't heard that one before.

* * *

The church hits him like a narcotic. Just being here brings back obscene feelings of safety. Tucked into a crypt with Karen. Being ministered to by Maggie spiritually and physically. The glorious reawakening of his senses after clearing his sinuses. He kneels on the pavement, his hands resting, bound, at the small of his lower back. The gag cutting painfully into his cheeks. The darkness still spinning around him despite his best efforts to orient himself.

A pair of scissors scrape open, closed. The sharpness of the metal rings in Matt's ears. He leans forward into Maggie's hands as she slips the blade under his gag at the back of his head and cuts once, twice. Matt tugs forward, his lips splitting anew. Blood pouring out from his mouth. Pain shooting up through his face. He doesn't care. He wants it off.

"Matthew," Maggie warns him, blood dripping over the thick fabric of her dress.

He stops, muttering an unintelligible apology. Maggie understands him loud and clear and returns to her ministrations. She works slowly, one snip at a time, until finally, mercifully, the gag splits.

Matt lets out a small cry and a gasp and Maggie gently tugs the soaked rag out of his mouth. He spits a wad of blood and mucous onto the floor and draws breath after breath, desperate to get the taste of drowning out of his mouth. "Lost a fight to a group of guys," he says, "woke up with a chain around my ankle getting…shot across a dock."

"Matthew."

"I think they must have tied a weight to it. Dropped it into the water. I don't…I don't know...seems like…an inconvenient way to kill someone."

The words keep coming out of him at a hysterical pace: he can't stop, even though every impulse inside him is to do so. His tongue is thick in his mouth and the head-spinning has gotten so bad that he knows he's swaying. Maggie's heart has hit a strange rhythm outside of her usual disappointment, something that would sound like fear in a lesser woman but only comes across as concern from her. She picks up the mug, tells him to have a drink, and Matt does as she says, the coffee and liquor steeping through his insides, banishing the chill.

She gives him another sip. Liquor brings the carousal ride of his thoughts to a halt and dulls the incessant nag of his numb fingers, of his aching body. Matt gestures to his ankles with his face – "I don't know how I got free" – and he's still trying to give her an explanation as she draws off his mask, as her hands rove over his brow and through his hair and around his ears and his chin. Matt stops suddenly, aware that he's wafting blood and coffee and Hudson murk into her face. Aware that she's right there, eye-level with him in the dark, her hands folded in front of her as she waits for him to quiet.

Matt licks his lips, drawing the next words back inside himself and pushing them deep down where they belong. His whole body is shaking; he can hear it squelching against his soaked armour. He hopes Maggie doesn't notice. Can never tell with her heartbeat what she sees and doesn't.

"There's a lock on the chains," he says finally. Exhaustedly. He's trying to maintain the inertia that brought him here but the alcohol hits him. The stones are so dense, Maggie's presence is so condensed, he's so relieved, that his eyelids are dropping. He could ride the drowse straight to sleep and it would be fine. But first, "I can't…I can't feel it with my gloves on, and I can't get the gloves off with the chain."

"There are some bolt cutters down here somewhere," Maggie says, "Let me find them."

She walks away, and Matt sinks back into the pillar, away from that sinking, twisted unmoored feeling, the one that feels too much like shooting off a dock into the Hudson. His eyes close, his breath evens out. He prods at the cuts in his mouth to stay awake.

Maggie pulls him off the pillar and leans him forward, careful not to throw him into the pavement. Matt puts himself there, the stone cool against his cheek. The ground stabilizing for his senses. He feels Maggie hook the blade of the bolt cutter on the lock and work to cut it.

Matt pulls to help her. Again, she orders him to stop. Matt does, his senses slipping out of focus, easing out over the stone, away from the uncomfortable tugging on his arms towards, of all things, the scrape of Maggie's shoes, the way the air cuts around her ankles, how tough she is for such a tiny person.

The lock snaps. Matt gradually seeps back into himself. Maggie looses the chain and Matt's arms fall to his sides. She tears off his gloves. She unzips the suit at his back. He starts tearing himself free of the Devil, spilling out on the floor in puddles of lake water and blood like a newborn.

* * *

He's amazed to find his bed is still made-up. Matt sits while Maggie fetches him from dry clothes, less by choice than by necessity. His concussion is perfectly evident now. The last of his adrenaline has worn off, and the alcohol has suppressed his concern for gentle acceptance of that lazy, dazed spinning on the spot.

Maggie returns to him with some clean things and Matt dresses on autopilot, occasionally noticing that her hand is guiding a hem or pulling a sleeve or adjusting a waistband.

"Why are you down here?" he asks, the question as to why she's touching him again dying in his mouth. He doesn't want an answer, not the truth or some snarky comment. He wants her to go on examining him with that clinical air; the dry warmth of her fingers banishing the damp, cold death that chewed up him earlier tonight.

"Guess I'm used to taking a walk down here," Maggie says.

She brushes a hand through his hair, searching for wounds even though she did that already. "I didn't think you'd come down here at night," Matt says.

"You never heard me, then," Maggie says, withdrawing her hands.

The loss of her touch strikes a chord in Matt. He tries to keep it from showing. "Why would you come?"  
"To make sure you were sleeping. You had nightmares. You did as a child, too. You remember." Matt does, but he doesn't want to talk about them. The horror of waking without his sight, at the question of whether the face he remembers in the dark is actually his father's face after all these years. At the shame of having needed her, at having needed anyone, to help quell bad dreams.

Maggie continues: "You would cry out sometimes in the infirmary. When you regained some of your strength, you would lash out. Roll over. Claw at the mattress. You were digging for something. Scared the wits out of the sisters."

He forces a smile he doesn't quite feel, tears in his eyes. "But not you."

"No," Maggie says sternly. She doesn't fear the Devil.

"What would you do?"

Her touch reappears. She takes his hand and holds it tight. Her warmth seems more intense against his palms. Matt lets his hands hang loose; he doesn't want to seem so attached, but the longer she holds him, the less he can resist. He draws his fingers around hers and he holds on, never once trapping her to him. Never once binding her to him. Despite the fact that he wants to stay in her grasp all night.

"Thank you, Maggie," he says.

She doesn't let go. "You're welcome, Matthew."

* * *

Happy Reading!


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